Iraqi offensive revives debate by presidential candidates

Sunday

Mar 30, 2008 at 12:01 AM

Fierce fighting has pushed the war back into the headlines.

By MICHAEL COOPER AND LARRY ROHTERThe New York Times

The heavy fighting that broke out last week as Iraqi security forces tried to oust Shiite militias from Basra is reverberating on the U.S. presidential campaign trail and posing new challenges and opportunities to the candidates, particularly Sen. John McCain.

The fierce fighting - and the threat that it could undo a long-term truce that has greatly helped to reduce the level of violence in Iraq - thrust the war back into the headlines and the public consciousness just as it had been receding behind a tide of economic concerns. And it raised anew a host of politically charged questions about whether the current strategy is succeeding, how capable the Iraqis are of defending themselves and what the potential impact would be of any U.S. troop withdrawals.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, has made the Iraq war a centerpiece of his campaign, and he rode to success in the primary season partly on his early advocacy of the troop buildup. The battle in Basra broke out as he returned from a trip to Iraq in March, proclaiming that violence there was down and that the troop escalation was working.

McCain said he was encouraged that Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki's government had sent its troops to reclaim Basra from the Shiite militias. "I think it's a sign of the strength of his government,'' McCain said Friday in Las Vegas. "I think it's going to be a tough fight. We know that these militias are well entrenched there. I hope they will succeed and succeed quickly.''

The Democrats, who are calling for phased troop withdrawals, are beginning to point to the fighting in Basra as evidence that the U.S. troop buildup has failed to provide stability and political reconciliation - particularly if the fighting leads one militia, the Mahdi army, to pull out of its cease-fire, which could lead to a new spate of sectarian violence across the country.

But the McCain campaign is hoping to turn that argument on its head, asserting that the battle in Basra shows just how dangerous the situation on the ground in Iraq is, which it says bolsters McCain's argument that a premature withdrawal of U.S. troops would lead to more widespread violence, instability and perhaps even genocide.

"I think that what this demonstrates is that there are very powerful forces that still remain that do not want to see the success of the central government and that would relish the prospect of the American withdrawal so that they could try to fight or shoot their way into power,'' said Randy Scheunemann, the McCain campaign's senior foreign policy adviser. "Would you rather have the Maliki government in control, or the Iranian-backed special groups in control or al-Qaeda in control?''

Dennis B. Ross, a former Middle East peace negotiator, said the violence posed risks for candidates in both parties.

"Sen. McCain is more vulnerable than the Democrats, because this is a reminder of how messy the situation remains in Iraq,'' Ross said. "This is an interesting reminder of how much remains to be done. With the main focus having been on the military side, the surge has not created enough of a self-sustaining political fabric.''

Campaign officials in both parties cautioned that the situation in Iraq appeared fluid and that preliminary reports of what was going on there were incomplete. But the officials agreed that the fighting in Basra - coming just two weeks before Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill - was likely to intensify the debate over the war once again.

The Democratic candidates, Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, did not directly address the Basra situation on Friday. But their aides said that the fighting there raised troubling questions about whether the troop buildup was making the country more stable. And given the trouble that the Iraqi security forces have had in ousting the militias, and their need for U.S. air support, they said it also called into question the fighting capabilities of the Iraqi military.

Denis McDonough, a senior foreign policy adviser to Obama, said the situation in Basra "does raise a handful of concerns as it relates to the surge and, more importantly, about the prospect of political reconciliation.''

Jay Carson, a spokesman for Clinton, said that the fighting in Basra appeared to be another manifestation of sectarian fighting in Iraq and that more emphasis had to be put on political reconciliation.

Clinton has recently been arguing that the troop buildup had failed to achieve its goals, as she did at a campaign event Tuesday at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg.

"President Bush seems to want to keep as many people as possible in Iraq,'' Clinton said. "It's a clear admission that the surge has failed to accomplish its goals.''

Ross, who wrote "Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World,'' said the Basra fighting posed hard questions not only for McCain but also for the Democrats. "It is a little sobering to say you can withdraw on a fixed timetable,'' he said.

"On the Democratic side, the question would be: If you withdraw, can you be confident you know what the result will be?'' he said.

Aaron Miller, a former State Department official who was an adviser to six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and the author of "The Much Too Promised Land: America's Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace,'' said the political ramifications of the latest fighting would depend on the success of the effort by the Iraqi army in Basra to root out insurgents there.

"If this comes out well and represents a really consequential development, it will play to McCain's strength, his argument that the surge is working and that training is a long-term effort,'' Miller said. "If it comes out in a gray area, and things start to unravel elsewhere, then it is going to validate the Democratic argument that we don't know the half of what is going on. It's very much a question of what the ending is and whether it is clear-cut.''

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